Its rhe only thing I wish could change about my experience using Lemmy, for more active users in the communities like NFL or NHL and the affiliated team pages of those sports. I haven’t had any social media in decades, my main source for sporting news breaks up until 1-2 years ago was Reddit.
I love the small community that makes up Lemmy. As someone just posted, it feels like a small town community. I like the absence of corporate shills and ads and bots.
Back when I switched from Reddit to Lemmmy, I made an effort to upvote and comment on the NFL and Buffalo Bills communities. I eventually gave up because it was like months of posting, voting and commenting but when I would go back to check the communities, everything would still be sitting at like 2 up votes and 0 comment replies or if it was my own post, 1 upvote and 0 comments. For a majority of cases. Every once in a blue moon I would come accross a post where another user voted or commented but it was never more than me and one other user.
I know there is a certain demographic that uses Lemmy that is mostly driven by the required IT prowess needed to set up, use and even understand the federated concept. I also recognize that this demographic is traditionally disinterested in sports. Im not complaining about this or the users who are on Lemmy. Im also not wishing for any changes be made to aggressively expand Lemmy’s user base. Its just an impractical wish I have so I could get my sports news from the same source I get all my other news.
I will prolly spend more time this coming year settling on a 2ndary source for sports news from sources similar to sleeper app but it would be so nice if the Lemmy sporting communities blew up so I could keep everything aggregated to one source.
As a Canadian, it’s the one place I can go to Canadian communities and not be completely buried by fucking hockey. Even this whole elbows up thing is fucking terrible. I get why. I understand that people have been indoctrinated to this and it’s part of their identity here. I don’t understand why it has to be absolutley everywhere though.
Dude. Sports is literally everywhere. It doesn’t need to reach its greedy tendrils into yet another corner of society.
pro sports are about as normie of an activity as you can get… it’ll be a while before anything beyond futbol ends up here
We’re here there’s just not a lot of us yet
Sports are dumb anyway!
So original and edgy! To each their own🍻
I should have used /s, just joshin
I thought the exact same thing when i joined. Today while working on my project car I decided to take pictures and make a post sometime over the next few days when I’m done with the task. Hopefully someone sees it and starts discussion and adds content to one of the niche communities here that was actually one of my favorite non toxic subs on shitty ass reddit.
We get to build these communities and it’s kind of exciting 🤙
We like sports and we don’t care who knows.
I would be interested in NHL stuff but I don’t even consume that much NHL content. If somebody actively posts in NHL and other hockey related sub lemmy communities then I’ll join and try to engage as much as I can.
I get so pissed when I hear stories of the shit the nhl tries out in hopes of growing their fan base when all they need to do is strike a deal with a streaming platform that will allow local markets watch their local team. Ever since I got rid of cable, fuck maybe a decade now, I have all but gave up watching hockey. Yeah ill watch playoffs and yeah I know I can pirate a live stream for each game but for 82 games a year its asking a lot to search for a good streaming source.
It does feel like a small town. Most small towns don’t have pro sports teams, though.
Oh shit this reminds me of a discussion I had on here a while ago when I found out there are only 40,000 daily active users on average and realizing that it was less than half of th capacity of highmark stadium. So yeah, Lemmy does have that small town vibe but its more of a small geographic community like, for example, New England or Western New York. I can go to any Bills game with 80,000 other fans and I can take a piss or grab a beer without running into someone I know. Its exactly the same with Lemmy too.
I feel like most of the writing communities are also pretty inactive. I’m not sure why. I liked reading short stories on Reddit, and I don’t like looking at memes. I’m not sure whether it’s a good thing (because I don’t use Lemmy as often that way) or a bad thing.
I guess I could spam them with public-domain stories or reposts or something, but I feel like that’s just losing the plot.
Wait - writing communities on Lemmy?
This is exactly how I feel across all lemmy communities. Back in my reddit days id find myself writing out entire comments in full, only to delete them before submitting just to avoid a subsequent flood of replies. On lemmy I find myself leaving more and more comments even on shit I barely care about just hoping to drive more user discussions.im not complaining. I genuinely love lemmy and hated reddit, but I cant help feeling like im spaming posts with my comments.
I’m not a sports guy, I’m pretty anti-sports actually (I can go on absolutely unhinged TED talks about how the local teams are trying to drain the city for taxes… I want to continue, so feel free to ask but not doing it here.) But I agree with you on the niche hobbies and local flavor.
I still have to use Reddit because there hasn’t been a good community for local on Lemmy (yes, I know everyone going “it’s user generated” but I’m like 1 of 5 instead of the hundreds still on reddit) and small hobbies in a lot of the crafting world is non-existent on Lemmy.
I don’t have an answer on this one, just sucks. It’s the trouble of being one of the first ones in the door.
So this is the type of discussion I was hoping for. I honestly didn’t even mean to trigger so many people by bringing up sports when the whole showerthought started cuz I missed my local team’s subreddit.
I can go on absolutely unhinged TED talks about how the local teams are trying to drain the city for taxes…
Don’t even get me started, we are in the same paddle boat when it comes to the ownership and the league’s use of tax payer dollars. The fucking Bills just set some sort of record I think for the new stadium they built by the belligerently small amount of money the owners are going to be contributing. The fuckin thing is costing billions and its just about entirely funded by 2 channels from the same source, the people of our our community. 1 channel is thru taxes and the other is thru some PPE shit where if you want to buy season tickets you need to give them like $40,000 as a one time fee into of the season ticket cost and also commit to like 10 seasons to even be able to buy a season ticket.
I know your reply will be “then why are you a fan still” so ill bashfully explain why in one word, community. The WNY community is my favorite part of the greater Buffalo/Niagara region and being apart of Billsmafia is such a huge part of it. We’ve never been a champion, until 5 years ago there were no bandwagons of fans looking to become Bills fans, its something you are just born into here. We put up with 8 ft snow storms, 17 years of missing the playoffs, losing 4 super bowls in a row, Damar Hamlin going into a freak occurrence of cardiac arrest and needing 10 mins of CPR to survive, and thats just the big stuff. At the end of the day tho, it forms a bond in the community like I’ve never seen anywhere else. When Josh’s Allen’s grandmother died, Billsmafia raised millions of dollars for his charity which came in $17 increments (his jersey number), now today there is an entire wing at Oshea’s Children’s Hospital dedicated to his grandmother’s name all funded by fans and member of the community. When we got dumped on with 6 ft of snow in 2 days, Bills players drover around house to house in skidsters plowing out people’s driveways. When Andy Dalton beat the Ravens against all odds and made it so the Bills would go to the playoffs breaking a 17 year long drought, Andy isnt even a Buffall Bills player he plays for Cincinnati but that didn’t stop Billsmafia from raising hundreds of thousands if not over a million dollars for Andy’s charity.
The idiots who own teams and run the league can get fucked, ill never argue against that but the men and women within each and every organization who have their boots on the ground, they are all amazing humans busting their ass off to make theirs and our community the best they possibly can.
Oh I get it completely. There’s a bunch of subreddits I miss, my industry I work in which is very niche, leatherworking, heck even the motorcycle community in Lemmy is… lacking.
On the other part you brought in… OH BOY! Unhinged TED talk time.
So I live relatively close to the Royals and the Chiefs stadiums. John Sherman, gas magnate, the owner of the Royals decided he wanted to move the stadium to downtown, where things have been picking up. Specifically he wanted it in the Crossroads where there’s a lot of local community shops and everything, because he wanted it near Power and Light district where there’s bars and the like which… oh right, he owns a lot of. Troubles came up that the stadium proposals took foooooooorever to even come up, looked like it was drawn on a napkin instead of anything serious, and wanted a tax levy to be put on the city to continue one that still hasn’t been paid off for the last time the two stadiums were built. The whole time saying “Look how the stadiums bring business in!”… the area around the two stadiums have managed to keep a Denny’s and a Taco Bell alive, the big resort hotel couldn’t even survive. Yea… real great for business.
Another trouble is… as I say, I am one of those who actively detests sports… I wish I could find the post, there’s an old Reddit post describing what not liking sports was like and used archeology in how it invades everything around you so it’s easy to go from “I couldn’t care less” to “Okay, I hate this thing now. It is insufferable.” I say all that to say, just paying any attention to the news I knew at the time the Royals was the second worst team in the MLB, they were that bad. So they knew they couldn’t get this move off the ground so they went to the Chiefs who was the most recent superbowl winner which of course was happy to get money their way, and the ad campaign went out. And despite the Royals/Sherman being the push on getting this going, it was all Chiefs all the time. I literally even got a flier in my mail “The liberals are trying to take away our teams!” paid for by the team push, so yay politics even drug in. The whole time threatening “Well if you don’t vote it in, we’ll move. Maybe to Kansas (right over the border) or hey, even Tennessee.” Thing is, the state remembers St. Louis on the other side had the rams, built them a stadium and whoopsiedoodle they packed up and moved to California leaving a city with a stadium and fuck all to do with it.
So we’ve got all sorts of issue in state and local level, but holy fuck all the political pressure since the voters turned down the tax is “How can we keep these teams in Missouri!” And it’s funny, I said I’d be more okay paying for it if we got ANYTHING out of it… I don’t mind paying taxes to keep our zoo going and it’s nice I get a hefty discount when I go, but the Royals and Chiefs are giving a nice hearty “go fuck yourself” for us paying taxes so the billionaires have their teams.
On to the “Why are you a fan?” question you brought up. I don’t question it… but I’ve never understood it. I grew up in Arkansas that never had a pro team so college sports was big… I got to hear the “calling the hogs” my entire life and never comprehended the why. Probably because dad was not a sports guy and had the opinion “Why do I want to watch people play a game?” even though he played in high school and I’ve been pretty much the same. I get the community stuff, and that’s fantastic. I’ve just found a community outside of sports so it doesn’t resound to me. The reason I’ve become so against sports beyond it’s completely impossible to ignore it it’s so inundated in culture, is the sheer amount of money that goes into it in all levels. High school, if you’re one of the “football” schools, your school only has 3-4 sports, all the big stadium ticket getting team sports, the smaller less prestigious schools get more sports like wrestling and the like… guess which situation I ended up in? And watching schools dump money into the sports above all other things like theater, labs, etc. “But it brings in money for the school.” Cool cool… so why are we getting asked for a tax levy so the school can build yet another stadium? Repeat this for the college level so the “Hogs can have a proper place to play!” and now the city with pro teams level. And I hear the ticket prices and think I wouldn’t pay those prices to see my favorite band… and again, those ticket prices and yet we have to pay for their shit?
ESPNs fees and blackouts exhausted me.
If folks want to gather around and cheer for a sport again, I’m in.
But I’m waiting for a DRM free, non-geo-locked, consistent, reliable Livestream URL. It can be paid, but there probably needs to be free tier to get me interested.
I get that I’m asking a lot, since streaming isn’t cheap. But I refuse to believe it’s as burdensome as ESPN makes it.
Edit: To be clear - please link me to your favorite non-ESPN sports streaming services, and I’ll check them out. Thanks in advance!
Go Bills, fellow Reddit expat and I definitely miss just getting news posted about the team and Lemmy is nowhere near that level of activity. I’ve ended up just going back to old.Reddit and browsing new here and there - no commenting, not logged in, so it’s not nearly as time consuming as it used to be. Hopefully someday people will use Lemmy for stuff like this!
Fuck yeah, Go Bills!
Go Bills. I started on the twobillsdrive board until that went to shit. Migrated to the bills subreddit after that. Would be nice to have that here.
One thing to do is link people on reddit to lemmy. That’s how I found out about this place. Most people have no idea it exists
I personally cant watch NFL after being a lifelong fan. Seems like the games are being manipulated. Seems a little glitchy with some weird calls being made these days. Became unwatchable for me but …Go Ravens !!!
Go Bills! Well now that youre here, it makes 3 of us! According to the laws of nature that officially makes us a community of Bills fans instead of a couple of Bills fans😂
Having a small community means you will not attract all the toxic people most of the time.
For me Lemmy feels like s small town ( New Hope, Pennsylvania) with mostly nicer people, while Reddit is a big town (New York) that is well known, but you have a lot more assholes.😅
And honestly, I really enjoy Lemmy for that.🙂
“I like the absence of corporate shills and ads.” Also, why doesn’t anyone talk about sports teams owned by billionaires and corporations?
